HOUNTED HERSELF

Chapter Three: The Playhouse

Charles had built the playhouse over two weekends. He built it just out in the strip of yard behind the kitchen. Where the grass had never quite recovered from whatever the house's last owners had done to it. He built it the way he built everything... methodically. With more care than the object strictly required. Measuring twice and cutting once and getting visibly, quietly satisfied every time a board sat flush against another the way the instructions promised it would. I want to say, before I get any further into this, that the playhouse was my idea and Charles's labor, and that the difference between those two things matters more than it might seem to.

It started with Ms. Esti, though not directly. She'd never have suggested anything so specific, that wasn't her way. What she did gave me, at a second conference a few weeks after the one with the drawing. Was something smaller and more diffuse, a worry shaped like an observation. "He's not unhappy," she said, choosing the words with the particular care of a teacher who has learned not to alarm a parent unnecessarily. "I want to be clear about that. He's not unhappy. But he doesn't seem to be finding his place in the group yet. Recess, mostly. He'll play near the other children rather than with them. Sits a little apart at lunch some days."

"Is that unusual? This early in the year, new school and all"

"It can be normal," she agreed. "Some children take longer. I only wanted you to know I'd noticed, in case it's something you're noticing too, at home."

I was noticing it at home. I hadn't put a name to it the way she'd just put a name to it for me. But ofcourse I'd noticed Sammy spending more time alone in his room than he used to. I noticed him narrating elaborate dinosaur battles to an audience of no one. I drove home from that conference doing the thing I did most efficiently that whole autumn. Which was converting worry into guilt and guilt into a plan of action. Because a plan of action, unlike worry, is a thing you can actually do something about. It was my idea to move us here. I want that stated plainly, since I spent so long letting Charles carry the credit for it publicly while privately knowing better. And if it was my idea to move us here, then it followed, that any cost the move extracted from Sammy was a cost I had specifically authored. And that I therefore owed him something in return. Not an apology, exactly, because I couldn't make myself believe yet that an apology was owed. Especialy not when some part of me was still so certain the move had been necessary. Had been a kind of homecoming I couldn't fully explain even to myself. But something. A consolation. A peace offering disguised as a gift.

"What if we built him somewhere of his own," I said to Charles, that evening, after Sammy had gone up to bed. "Out back. A playhouse. Somewhere he could have to himself, or bring friends to, once he's made some."

Charles looked at me for a long moment in that way he had, the look of a man doing careful thinking behind a calm face. "You think a playhouse is going to fix him not having friends?"

"I think it might give him a reason to want some," I said, which sounded better in my head than it did out loud. And Charles, who had spent enough years married to me by then to recognize a guilt-shaped request when he heard one. But he didn't push the point any further than that single raised eyebrow. He simply nodded. He'd nodded at most of my ideas that autumn, with the patient faith of a man who had already decided. Back in the dark of our old bedroom with the moving boxes stacked against the wall. That he was going to trust me even when trusting me cost him something he couldn't yet name.

He drew up plans on a yellow legal pad that weekend. Like he drew up plans for everything, careful penciled rectangles with measurements noted along each side. By Saturday morning he was out in the yard with a level and a stack of lumber from the hardware store two towns over. Whistling something tuneless and content, looking more like himself than he had since we'd crossed onto Birchwood. I watched him from the kitchen window while I did the dishes. Hammer rising and falling in a rhythm I could have set a clock to. And I... felt relieved. Not at the progress of the playhouse itself, though that was satisfying enough to watch. But it was at the simple fact of Charles out there in the daylight, doing something straightforward and solvable with his hands. A problem with a clear beginning and a clear end, the kind of problem our marriage hadn't been handed very many of since we'd moved in.

It took him two full weekends, with Sammy underfoot for most of both. Sammy would hand over the wrong-sized nails with great solemnity and asking, every fifteen minutes or so, whether it was almost done.

"Houses take time, bud," Charles told him, more than once, in the patient tone of a man enjoying being asked. "Good ones do, anyway."

By the second Sunday it had walls and a roof and a little square window cut into the side facing the kitchen, no glass yet. An open frame Charles promised to fit with something eventually. A door on leather hinges that Sammy insisted on testing roughly forty times in a row. He swings it open and shut with the single-minded devotion of a boy who has just discovered that an object he helped build now belongs, to him.

"What do you think, Samsam?" Charles asked, stepping back to survey the finished thing with his hands on his hips, the particular posture of a man admiring his own competence.

Sammy didn't answer right away. He stood in the doorway of the little house, one hand on the frame, looking into the small dim interior with an expression I couldn't quite place. Not quite delight, though there was delight somewhere in it. But something more careful underneath. The look of a child taking inventory of a space before deciding how he felt about it.

"It's good," he finally said. Which from Sammy was high praise, and disappeared inside for the rest of the afternoon. He emerges only for dinner, smelling of fresh-cut lumber and grass.

I stood in the yard a while after Charles had gone in to wash up. Looking at the little structure sitting there in the long shadow of the real house behind it. I felt the strangest doubled sensation. Pride in what Charles had built, genuine and uncomplicated. But sitting right alongside something else I didn't have a name for yet. Something closer to unease, though I couldn't for the life of me have told you, that evening, what exactly there was to be uneasy about. It was just a playhouse. A small wooden box with a window and a door, built by a man who loved his son enough to spend two weekends of good weather hunched over a level instead of resting. I think now, looking back, that some part of me had already started to wonder whether we'd built Sammy a house to be less lonely in. Or simply handed him a second house, smaller and closer to the ground, to be lonely in instead. I didn't let myself finish that thought all the way through, that evening. I had dinner to get on the table, and Charles's pride to admire properly, and a great many other, more immediate things to attend to.

The first time I saw the other child, I assumed. The way youd assume the most reasonable thing first and only abandon it when the unreasonable thing insists. That maybe he was a friend from the new school. It was a Tuesday, late afternoon and the particular gold hour before dinner when I'd usually be starting to think about pots and pans. I glanced out the kitchen window out of pure habit, the way you check on a child playing in sight of the house, and saw two boys in the yard instead of one.

Sammy was sitting cross-legged just inside the playhouse doorway, and across from him, also cross-legged, facing him, was another boy... older. Though it was hard to say from that distance and through the window's slight distortion, somewhere in his teens. The other boy had dark hair and a stillness to him that struck me, even from the kitchen, as unusual in a child that age. Most boys that age don't sit still. They fidget, they fold and unfold their legs, they pick at the grass. This one sat with his hands flat on his knees, facing Sammy, utterly motionless except for what looked, from that distance, like talking. His mouth moving, Sammy's head tilted in the particular posture of a child listening intently to something he finds important. There was something in the set of his shoulders, even at that distance, that nagged at me in a way I couldn't place. The way a stranger on the street will sometimes carry himself like someone you know, before you've consciously registered why. I felt, I'll admit, a small flush of relief before anything else. He's made a friend, I thought. Whatever Ms. Esti was worried about, it's resolving itself. I went back to the onions, half-listening for the sound of the back door. The announcement of a new name I'd need to remember, a mother to call and arrange a proper playdate with. It was perhaps twenty minutes later, washing my hands at the sink, that I glanced out again. And felt the first small wrongness settle into my chest. Not anything I could have named cleanly. Just a held breath of a feeling, the same gravity I'd felt at the front gate of this house as a girl. Except smaller now, more localized, pointed at one particular corner of my own backyard.

The other boy was still there. Still sitting exactly as he had been, cross-legged, hands flat on his knees, facing Sammy across the small dim interior of the playhouse. Twenty minutes is a long time for two children to sit perfectly still in the same posture, talking. Neither one of them shifting their weight or scratching an itch or doing any of the thousand small restless things children's bodies do without permission. I stood at the sink with the water still running over my hands and watched a moment longer. Telling myself I was imagining the stillness. That maybe the angle and the distance were playing tricks with my sense of how long anything had actually been happening.

I dried my hands and went out.